President George H.W. Bush, Barbara Bush had deep family ties to Ohio

George H.W. Bush appears with Cincinnati Reds shortstop Barry Larkin before the 2003 Opening Day at Great American Ball Park.(Staff file photos by Greg Lynch)

Staff file photos by Greg Lynch

— The former president George H.W. Bush’s had family connections to Ohio.

President Bush died on Friday at the age of 94.

Bush’s family on his father’s side has roots in Ohio. His father Prescott Bush was born in Ohio, who eventually served as a U.S. senator for Connecticut, was born in 1895 in Columbus to Flora Sheldon Bush and Samuel Prescott Bush.

Bush’s grandfather Samuel Prescott Bush lived for most of his life in Ohio and died in Columbus in 1948. His obituary in the New York Times stated that he was president for 22 years of Buckeye Steel Casting Co. in Columbus and was the former president of the Ohio Manufacturers Association.

Former first lady Barbara Bush also had Dayton and Ohio ties.

Her parents, Marvin Pierce and Pauline Robinson, met at Miami University in Oxford.

When the family lived in New York years later, Marvin would bring Barbara on trips to Dayton when he worked for McCall Corporation. He went on to be the president of McCall’s, the publisher of Redbook and McCall’s.

“When I was four or five years old, my father would take me with him on business trips to Dayton, the site of a McCall plant,” Barbara Bush wrote in her memoir.

Barbara Bush’s grandfather Scott Pierce was an insurance salesman for a while in Dayton. In her memoir, Bush said her grandfather and grandmother “lost all their money in the 1890s, and my grandfather never recovered. He sold insurance in Dayton, Ohio, but the family lived humbly.”

Barbara Bush’s grandmother Mabel Pierce was born in Hamilton County in 1869 and died in Dayton in 1920.